The Man Who'll Make a Gorgeous Guitar Out of Anything

Matt Artinger was put on this earth to design and build some of the sweetest-sounding guitars ever crafted. And when a man figures out what he was put on this earth to do, he is fortunate indeed.

A few years back, one of Matt Artinger's customers had an idea. "He had run into some scrap aluminum sheeting from an actual World War II B-24 Liberator, and he wanted to design a guitar with it," says Artinger, a sturdy, five-foot-something son of Pennsylvania's industrious Lehigh Valley, where he works out of a former elementary school in a town called Emmaus. "I thought it was the coolest thing on earth, so of course I said yes." Dubbed "Final Objective," after the nose art on the vintage bomber from which its materials came, the resulting guitar incorporated not only the salvaged aluminum skin, replete with rivets, but also scrounged cockpit parts, a fretboard inlaid with the U.S. Army Air Force logo, and a scaled-down rendition of the original nose art.

Artinger said yes again when he was approached by a guitar-playing toy collector who sought a double-necked instrument to commemorate his considerable enthusiasm for G.I. Joe paraphernalia. "It had a custom paint job on it with Snake Eyes, a bad guy, and it had one of the good guys—I don't recall which good guy it was and I'm embarrassed about that because I was a G.I. Joe freak as a kid. It had .45-caliber bullets as the knobs and swords going up the necks," he says. "It was insane."

Matt Artinger, thirty-nine, is approaching his twentieth year in business as a luthier, which is a fancy way of saying he builds guitars for a living. All kinds of guitars— close to seven hundred in all, no two precisely the same. Electric guitars, acoustic guitars, bass guitars, delicate jazz guitars, take-no-prisoners rock-and-roll guitars, ornate, plain, elegant, outrageous—whatever a customer wants, so long as Artinger thinks he can do it justice. A typical instrument requires seventy-five to a hundred hours of labor over roughly six months, and prices start at $2,900 for a basic model—in line with the cost of a high-end mass-produced guitar—but can escalate quickly. "He's fairly young as far as luthiers go but his quality is up there with some of the older masters," says Bob Willcutt, proprietor of Willcutt Guitars in Lexington, Kentucky, a top dealer for most of the big-name brands who also stocks guitars from a curated slate of small builders like Artinger. "He's an underground favorite."

Willcutt was introduced to Artinger's work in part by Kingsley Durant, fifty-seven, a fellow Kentuckian who owns sixteen Artinger guitars among a collection that numbers north of fifty instruments, several of which are custom-built. "It's the same thing that drives people to shop at farmer's markets," says Durant of the allure of handcrafted instruments. "Yeah, it's going to be more expensive, but you're getting something a real person built. It's about support of small artisans." Artinger calls it an intimacy: "You're not dealing with an infrastructure. You're dealing with one guy who is bleeding and sweating over every guitar." Bleed and sweat he does. Artinger's work ethic is legendary among his peers and customers alike. "He's immersed," says jam-guitar wizard Steve Kimock, perhaps best known for playing alongside members of the Grateful Dead. "It's not like he does this when he's not doing something else. Matt doesn't do something else."

Artinger's primary workspace, once a first-grade classroom, is now a gallery of guitar templates.

Christopher Leaman

Artinger's story is an enviable one—that rare tale of a man doing well by doing precisely what he was put on this earth to do, undaunted by the odds against success, unfazed by powerful and prolific competition, and seemingly unburdened by the pedestrian concerns that stymie most men's dreams. He has followed an obsession to its wonderful, logical conclusion, propelled initially by the naïveté of youth, blinded to perils and distractions along the way by the singular vision that burns through his safety goggles, and now in a position to step back from his work long enough—and only long enough—to survey with deep satisfaction what he has wrought, both on the workbench and in life.

Artinger's craft has evolved considerably from its roots, back when the M in MTV still stood for something. "I was fascinated by guitars from a young age," he says. "I'd cut them out of cardboard and stand in front of the TV, as embarrassing as it is to say now." He built his first real guitar, an acoustic, from a kit at age sixteen, and almost immediately built another. And another. Working out of his family's basement, he eventually earned a following.

The parade of adults arriving to pick up instruments from this upstart kid made for an amusing scene—and focused his parents' attention on Artinger's burgeoning obsession. His mother and stepfather even arranged a meeting with Chris Martin, head of venerable acoustic guitar-maker C.F. Martin & Co., based in nearby Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

"I think their motivation was that he would knock a little bit of sense into me and say it was an unrealistic goal to build guitars for a living," says Artinger. "But he did just the opposite. He told me to follow my dreams, so that's exactly what I did."

Through his teens, Artinger continued to hone his skills, apprenticing with a local cabinetmaker to bolster his woodworking chops, constructing store kiosks and built-ins for high-end local homes, even a news desk for Channel 6 in Philadelphia. After hours, Artinger had free rein in the shop and access to tools no teen could afford. At nineteen he became one of Martin's youngest-ever factory-certified warranty repairmen.

In 2006 Artinger launched a design of his own, the OMC Artinger 1, under the Martin banner. A midsize acoustic with a solid Sitka-spruce top, Indian rosewood sides and back, and koa accents, the guitar typifies Artinger's forward-leaning approach. The sound hole is not round, but oval, and it's slanted. An unusual bevel on the top edge of the guitar helps avoid damping caused by the player's arm resting directly on the body. A second oval "soundport" cut into the guitar's upper side helps project the instrument's output directly to the player's ear, while the fretboard inlays—typically mother-of-pearl—are cut from aluminum. The overall aesthetic is one of unconventional grace, modern and classic at once. "His work is very crisp and clean—that's kind of the Artinger thing, the Artinger appeal," says Bill Comins, a Philadelphia luthier whose instruments, a staple among jazz players, have been exhibited in the Smithsonian. "He tends to take everything he sees and make it his own, and he does it with a very refined sense of line."

￼Clockwise from top left: At day's end, Artinger is a mess of sawdust and sweat; a semi-hollow-body guitar in quilted maple; soldering the guitar's electronics; a well-used drill press.

Christopher Leaman

When it comes to guitars, however, the proof is in the playing. "As pretty as a guitar looks, it has to perform five times better," says Artinger. "It's not a piece of furniture; it's a functional piece of art." A guitar's inherent sound is the product of a complex interaction between its materials, which vibrate—or don't—in sympathy with the strings. "Every element you put on a guitar has a counterbalancing element to it and to get that balance right is the most important thing in making a great-sounding guitar," says Artinger. "If you're using soft materials you have to counter with hard materials." Artinger is unusually adept at capturing the specific sounds his customers seek, says Clay Sears, who has toured with a who's who of pop and hip-hop artists and has played Artinger guitars onstage with Jay Z, Rihanna, and Janet Jackson. "We talked in great detail about things that are really hard to put into words—like how do you describe boinginess or elasticity or snap or punch," says Sears. "Communicating with somebody who can really speak that language is super important."

Wood is the most critical input in guitar construction, and Artinger strives to source the best he can find. "Fortunately, I've gained relationships with people who procure and sell wood over the years," he says. "If they run into something they think I'd like, they'll forward me pictures." In the hallway outside his shop, Artinger shows off one of his latest acquisitions, a towering slab of wood called box-elder burl, a boldly figured maple variant that has one other notable characteristic—it positively reeks. (Artinger describes the smell as "a gentle bouquet of dead fish, feet, and peat moss.") Seven feet tall, twenty-six inches across, and thick enough to weigh 375 pounds, the fresh-cut hunk stands propped on the checkerboard linoleum floor, partially obscuring a bright American-eagle mural that once welcomed kids to class. "It's a perfect example of what we have to deal with when we're procuring wood," Artinger says. "Out of this giant piece of wood, I'm going to be lucky to get two guitar tops that are probably going to weigh about twelve ounces each."

Returning to his office (once shared, for reasons perhaps best not investigated, by the principal and the school nurse) Artinger steps into the adjacent room—a former first-grade classroom that serves as his primary workspace. There's the usual array of woodshop machinery, along with some more specialized stuff. Various templates and exterior molds line the wall high above the blackboard that still anchors the room. A bending iron, a heated cylinder used to warp damp strips of wood to form the curved sides of hollow guitars, sits at one corner of an immense worktable, across from a carefully angled jig used to perfect Artinger's guitar necks. There are clamps, clamps, and more clamps—enough aggregate clamping power to make a diamond from a charcoal briquette. But most precious is a set of well-worn finger planes—tarnished cast-bronze tools Artinger uses to hand-carve the arched tops and backs of his hollow guitars. "I'd be lost without these," he says.

Building guitars is great fun, says Artinger, but as a profession, it's not for dilettantes. "This is one of those ten-thousand-hour careers, where you don't even have a relative grasp of what you're doing until you get to that point—and it's still a struggle from there," he says. Even so, "By the end of the day, I might just have two areas around my eyeballs, because of my goggles, that aren't covered with sawdust and sweat, but those are some of the most fun days I have. Those are the days where eight hours can go by in like fifteen minutes."

Artinger turns back to his bench, where he's leveling frets on a nearly completed blue-green semi-hollow "convertible" electric that features an oblong soundport with a unique removable cover. The sun streams across the erstwhile playground outside and through the big elementary-school windows. This is a cheerful place to work. Artinger looks up from the guitar and sets down the fret file. "Every day I wake up to a new set of tasks, a new set of issues, a new set of things to solve," he says. "Every day is a new day for me and I'm getting to do exactly what I want to do." He's immersed, as Kimock would say, but somewhere in the back of his mind, one suspects, is his next challenge. A customer recently asked if he could build an electric guitar weighing two pounds or less, which any luthier will tell you would be a remarkable feat. Artinger said yes.

*This article originally appeared in the November 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics.

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